When Ivy June opened her eyes the next morning, she wasn’t sure if it was Saturday or Sunday. She didn’t hear Papaw moving around in the kitchen making flapjacks the way he did on weekends, but it couldn’t be a school morning because it was already light outside.
Then she remembered that Papaw was working six days this week. It was Saturday, and there was nowhere she had to go, so she snuggled down under the blanket and let her mind play out scenes from the night before: she and Catherine doing the new duck dance, everybody waddling around and laughing; Jimmy Harris’s buddy spilling Mountain Dew on his jeans; and—she’d saved the best till last—Jimmy holding her hand as he walked her back to Jessie’s car after the dancing was over. Jessie had had a good time too, talking to Earl’s cousin up there on the porch. Then Ivy June remembered Shirl’s remark about her hair. She frowned to herself and rolled over.
Catherine’s bed was empty, so Ivy June got up and slipped out the back way, passing Catherine coming back from the outhouse.
“Your grandmother says we can have breakfast in our pajamas on the front porch,” Catherine told her.
“The porch?” exclaimed Ivy June.
“She’s got Grandmommy out there. Says it’s turning colder this afternoon, so we should enjoy the weather while we can.”
It was a beautiful morning, Ivy June decided. The kind of morning that if she were on a ranch in Oklahoma, or a stage in Lexington, she’d be sitting on a fence singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
Mammaw had placed a platter of scrambled eggs and bacon on a small wooden table just outside the front door. There was also some of her fried toast, thick slices of buttered bread grilled on top of the iron stove. Papaw had told her long ago that they could afford an electric one, but Mammaw wouldn’t have it. Said she’d have to learn to cook a whole new way, that she’d take a new washing machine before she got a new stove.
Grandmommy was enjoying the sun. She had her feet on a stool, sticking right out where the sun could reach them, and her toothless mouth worked itself up and down as she rubbed her thin fingers together and turned her head to the right or left when she heard a crow’s call or the distant bark of a dog. It seemed to Ivy June that the worse her vision got, the more her hearing improved.
“This is heaven!” said Catherine, reaching for another slice of warm bread and slathering it with Mammaw’s wild strawberry jam. “Mom loved those preserves you gave us,” she told Mammaw. “We already finished one jar and started the second.”
“Then I’ll send a jar or two back home with you,” said Mammaw, pleased. “I got just enough to last us till berry season comes again.” She leaned forward and checked the sky. “See the clouds? That’ll tell you the cold’s coming in, but I don’t feel it yet.” She turned to Grandmommy. “You all right there, Iree?”
“I’m okay,” said the old woman. “But it’s the last spring.”
Ivy June and Catherine stopped chewing and looked at Grandmommy.
“Now, Iree, why do you think that?” Mammaw asked her. “When a woman lives to be a hundred, why … no telling how much longer she could live!”
“Last spring for somebody,” Grandmommy said, and her fingers curled and uncurled again, resting on the faded dress.
Mammaw pondered that awhile, leaning back in the rocker and letting the breeze fan her face. “Well, it’s always the last spring for somebody, Iree, but it don’t have to be you,” she said. And turning to the girls, “You have a good time down at Earl’s last night? Myrtle Tolson tells me that on Friday and Saturday nights, the cars is parked every which way on the road outside Earl’s. She says one night there was even a license plate from Virginia. We get people coming in here from across the mountain, why, who knows what could happen.”
“Maybe it was just somebody visiting relatives,” said Ivy June, smiling a little.
“Well, if Earl’s gets any more popular, and then that barbecue place catches on …”
Mammaw stopped talking suddenly and leaned forward again, staring off down the hill. Ivy June and Catherine turned to see what had caught her attention.
Something was coming their way, bobbing slowly up and down, and at first Ivy June thought it was a man holding a boy on his shoulders. Then, squinting, she realized it was a man on horseback, coming up the hill from the footbridge.
“Trouble comes in threes,” rasped Mammaw, unblinking, her hands tightening their hold on the arms of the rocker.
Ivy June felt her own hands grow cold and her heart began to pound as Sam Feeley, the man with the ham radio, rode into the yard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The short, muscular man dismounted and tied the reins of his horse loosely around a dogwood at one side of the yard.
“I knew it! I knew it!” whispered Mammaw.
“Hello there, Emma,” Mr. Feeley called, with a slight tip of his cap. “Hello, Iree.”
Grandmommy’s head swiveled in the direction of the voice, but Mammaw didn’t return the greeting. Her body stiff, she said, “Sam, what you got to tell us?”
Papaw! Ivy June’s breath was coming out fast and shaky. Five more hours and his shift at the mine would have ended.
“State police radioed me this morning to take a message here, seeing as how I’m a little closer …,” Mr. Feeley said.
Ivy June stared at him, wondering if she’d been glad to see him, ever, always thinking of Mr. Feeley as a person full of bad news.
“You got a girl staying here named Catherine?” the man asked.
Ivy June blinked. Mammaw looked about in confusion. “Why, yes, this here is Catherine. She’s from Lexington.”
Sam Feeley touched the rim of his cap again as he turned toward Catherine. He wore a flannel shirt of brown and yellow plaid, and his belt buckle was hidden entirely by his large stomach, despite his small frame.
Mr. Feeley pulled a piece of paper from one shirt pocket, his glasses from the other. “Seems your father tried to get a message to the school, but it’s closed, of course, and he couldn’t reach a teacher…. Julia Dixon? That the name? So he called the state police and left a message, and I scribbled down what they told me best I could.”
“What’s happened?” asked Catherine.
“Says your mom fainted on … Thursday, I guess it was … and that they’ve discovered her … weakness, is it? … isn’t because of the pneumonia, but a heart condition. Your dad’s taking her to the Cleveland Clinic….” Mr. Feeley adjusted his glasses. “Yes, that’s it. Cleveland Clinic. And she’s going to have an operation.”
Catherine gave a little cry, and Mammaw reached over from the rocker and clasped her arm.
“Now, your dad says for you not to worry, that she’s got the best of doctors, and for you not to come home,” Mr. Feeley went on. “He says he wants you to stay right here like you planned…. Let’s see now…. Oh, yes. Peter and Claire are staying with Gramps and Rose … Rosemary, and there’s nothing you could do by coming home.”
Sam Feeley took off his glasses and stuck them back in his pocket. “I’d let you read this yourself, but you’d never make out my handwritin’. Can hardly read it myself. Sure sorry about your mother, but it sounds like they’re doing the right thing.”
“But … what kind of operation, and when is it going to be? Why did they have to go to Cleveland?” Catherine asked. Her eyes grew moist and the corners of her mouth sagged. “How long will they be there?”
Mammaw squeezed her arm. “Honey, your daddy couldn’t tell you what he don’t know yet himself.”
“But I have to talk to my mother!” Catherine said, the tears spilling over. “I should be there!”
“I’m sorry, miss,” Sam Feeley said again, “but seems to me if your dad thought you ought to be there, he’d’ve sent for you, and someone would drive you back. Best to do just like he says.” He turned to Mammaw again. “Sure hate to be the one bringing bad news. Many a time I’ve wished I didn’t have that old radio.”
“Last spring for somebody,” murmu
red Grandmommy, her fingers twitching, and Catherine jumped up and ran inside.
Ivy June started to follow, but Mammaw stopped her. “Let her cry alone a little, Ivy June. Then you go to her,” she said.
“Wasn’t sure just how the road was up this way,” Sam continued. “Week before last, the road from Pippa Passes to Pine Top was so muddy I couldn’t drive through. Didn’t know how it’d be over thisaway. Figured old Brandy here could bring me over maybe better’n my car.”
“Got some cider, Sam. Turning a little hard, but it’s cold,” Mammaw said. “Won’t you set down and have a glass? Piece of pound cake?”
“Might take that cider,” the stocky man said, sitting down on the chair Catherine had left. “Sure sorry about the news. Not the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re away from home.”
Ivy June got up then and went inside. Walked quickly through the parlor and into the tiny room where Catherine was sprawled on the bed, sobbing, one pajama leg twisted around her knee.
Ivy June crawled onto the cot and over to the single bed next to it. “Cat,” she said softly, “it’s going to be all right.”
“You don’t know that!” Catherine cried all the harder.
“She’s got the best doctors, your dad said! If he thought something bad would happen, he’d have asked us to drive you home.”
“That’s not it! They just want to protect me. They never tell me anything serious!” Catherine wept, her nose sounding clogged. “After Grandma died, I didn’t even know Gramps knew a woman named Rosemary. And the next thing I find out, he’s getting married. It’s always worse when they don’t tell you and you find out later. I want to be with my mom! I want to hug her!”
Ivy June looked around desperately, then reached out and picked up the gold locket from the backless chair that served as her bedside table. “Hold on to this, Cat,” she said. “It’ll be like touching your mom, with her picture inside.”
Catherine raised her head and stared at the locket through her tears. “It will not! That’s stupid, like you and your rock! That’s not going to help!”
Her throat tight, Ivy June put the locket back on the chair. She sat motionless on the cot, staring at her feet. They looked awkward, somehow—too big for her legs compared to Catherine’s size six-and-a-halfs. Her pajamas, thin with wear, looked faded beside the bright little pink and red hearts on Catherine’s.
But Catherine wasn’t through yet. She bolted up suddenly and leaned back against the wall, her face red and puffy and wet, her nose clogged: “I know you’re trying to be helpful, Ivy June, but you’re not! Your grandmother saying all the time she knew something bad was going to happen! She did not! Nobody knew this, not even Dad! We all thought it was pneumonia.”
“You’re right,” said Ivy June. “Mammaw didn’t know.”
They could hear Sam Feeley saying his goodbyes out on the porch, then the soft clop of the horse’s hooves on the bare ground, fading off into the distance.
Ivy June rolled off the cot. “Let’s go up to the Whispering Place,” she said. “Let’s put on our jeans and just climb.”
For a moment Catherine didn’t respond. Then, wordlessly, she got off the bed, picked up her clothes, and dressed.
“We’re going up the mountain,” Ivy June said to Mammaw as they went out and crossed the porch. Mammaw nodded.
There was a cool feel to the air now. The clouds were moving faster overhead, and when the girls reached the high ridge, the wind whistled through the saplings and Catherine stopped, listening, before she sat down.
For a long time neither girl spoke, just sat tuned to the wind’s whisperings, watching shadows scoot across the valley floor.
“If she dies,” Catherine said at last, “I won’t have had the chance to tell her I love her.”
Ivy June studied her friend’s face. “Haven’t you shown her in a hundred ways already?” she asked.
“It’s not the same as saying it,” said Catherine, and her voice sounded tense, controlled. “I just need to be with … with my family. With Gramps. Even Rosemary. Well, not Rosemary, maybe. But people who know that these things can happen. It’s not trouble number three, like it had to come. It doesn’t prove that superstition. And if Mom d … dies, it doesn’t have anything to do with a hundred-year-old woman saying that it’s somebody’s last spring.”
There was anger in Catherine’s words. In her eyes. She seemed to be glaring at Ivy June, but then she turned and looked again out over the valley.
“Well, I never said I believed that,” Ivy June said defensively.
“Maybe not, but I’ll bet you thought it. Just because your grandmother and great-grandmother and all the grandmothers before them believe something doesn’t make it true. No matter how many grandmothers put whiskey and turpentine on infections, that doesn’t mean it cures. You shouldn’t do things or believe things just because everybody who lived before you did.”
She set her jaw and gave Ivy June the same look as before. This time Ivy June glared back, anger roiling inside her. Never mind how upset Catherine might be, Ivy June wouldn’t let her go after Mammaw.
“Well, we’re not the ones who go to a private school just because our mother did. We’re not the ones who go into the printing business just because it belonged to our daddy.” Ivy June’s voice was shaking as she delivered that last line.
Catherine looked at her wide-eyed. “There’s a difference between wanting to keep a company going and keeping a superstition going,” she snapped.
“Even if your dad really wanted to be a pilot?” Ivy June shot back. “Down here the mine’s about all we’ve got. But in Lexington, your daddy could have been anything he wanted.”
Catherine blanched. “At least our traditions make sense.”
“A little boy having to wear a tie makes sense? Just because he’s going to the theater? That’s as silly as …” Ivy June stopped. What was happening here? What were they saying? “Let’s just both of us shut up and listen to the wind,” she said.
For a long time they did.
At last Catherine took a deep breath, her shoulders rising with resolution, then falling again. “I’m going to pretend we didn’t say any of this,” she told Ivy June.
“We can pretend, but it happened. No use playing like it didn’t.”
“But it’s so … so prejudiced!” said Catherine. “I was just upset about Mom.”
“And I’m sorry about your ma,” said Ivy June. “I’d want to be back home too if I were you.”
“We’re still friends, aren’t we?” Catherine asked. “I’d hate staying here if you were mad at me.”
Ivy June knew exactly how that felt. “Of course we’re friends,” she said.
They went back to the house, and Mammaw got out her scrap basket, filled with the small pieces of cloth she had saved from sewing projects, declaring she needed a new rag rug for just inside the door.
“It’s hard to keep your mind on two things at once,” she said to the girls, “and if your hands are busy, you may not fret so much over what you can’t do one single thing about.” She poked around through the ten-inch strips, all cut the same length, and selected a blue one and a yellow print. There were strips from old curtains, too, and from chair covers and bedspreads.
“What I want you to do,” she said, “is tie the ends of these pieces together into three long strips, all the same length. Like this.” Her knobby fingers demonstrated. “Then, when the scraps are all used up, we’ll braid the three long strips together, pulled nice and tight, till we’ve got us one long cloth rope. After that I’ll coil it around and around itself and stitch it all together. Looks good, don’t you think? Got me some fine colors there.”
Ivy June couldn’t tell if Catherine wanted the job or not, but she was too polite, as always, to refuse. And somehow it did seem to help. Mammaw turned the radio on to a country music station, one of only two stations they could get here in the hollow, and as Catherine’s fingers sorted through the basket, looking for co
lors that looked nice together, she relaxed a little and even smiled once or twice.
“Catherine,” Papaw said when he came home and heard the news about her mother, “when someone’s in a worrying place, it’s a comfort to know the family is carrying on, same as before. Your ma’s right where she should be now, and you carrying on as she planned is what she needs to hear. The minute your daddy wants you someplace else, we’ll take you there. Is that something you can hold on to?”
“I … I guess,” said Catherine.
About five, Ezra came running up the hill to say that Miss Dixon was down at the house and wanted to tell Catherine some more about her mother. Catherine dropped her work and flew out the door, Ivy June following close behind. Breathless, they ran down the hill and up the steps to Ma’s house, where the teacher was sitting on the swing, Ma on a folding chair across from her, Danny on Ma’s lap. Howard, who stood at the side of the house, seemed ready to run at the slightest scowl from Ivy June.
Miss Dixon got up and hugged Catherine, then pulled her down on the swing beside her. “When I came back from shopping this morning, there was a message from your dad that he’d tried to reach me, and he left a number for me to call. I did—his cell phone, I think—and he said that your mother was admitted to the Cleveland Clinic and was resting comfortably. Your doctor in Lexington had recommended a heart specialist there and made the arrangements.”
“How bad is it?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know the details, Catherine, but the surgery is scheduled for Monday morning. Your dad said he would call you at school as soon as it’s over. We’ll let you take the call in the office. He said to tell you that your mom knows how much you want to be there, but she feels much better knowing that you’re here with Ivy June. Peter and Claire are doing fine at your grandparents’.”
Catherine tipped back her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she said, “I think that not knowing—not being there—is the worst of all.”
“That’s the truth,” said Mrs. Mosley. “I remember one evening I near worried myself to death when Russell was out in a snowstorm. He never did get back the whole night, and I imagined him froze somewhere out on the road. All the while a neighbor had taken him in, and he was warm and toasty as could be. But there was no way of me knowing that. I’d have a hundred times wished myself out in that snowstorm dealing with it than sitting here worrying about what might be.”